Huawei Ascend G300 Review

Verdict: If you want to move on from a basic mobile to a smartphone, the Huawei Ascend G300 is a decent option at a good price. It has a good range of features, works well and looks more expensive than it really is.

Full Review

Specifications

Full Review

Huawei, the Chinese phone maker, is one step closer to becoming a leading name in the mobile market with its latest release, the Huawei Ascend G300. This Android phone (£100 on pay as you go, free on £15 a month contracts) is packed full of features – quite a feat for a budget phone. Mind you, already handsets such as HTC’s Explorer and the Orange San Francisco II have shown that you can get an Android handset with plenty of features for a low price.

Good looks

How a phone looks can be dictated by how much it costs – it’s easy to see a handset is cheap if it flexes and groans, but the Ascend G300 is not like that. It has a tidy chassis, its screen is framed in black and there is a silver edge on the phone, while the reverse has a white surround. It looks more expensive than it is and the body feels strong, despite the plastic battery cover. It feels well made and nice to hold in the hand.

Screen star

Many mobile manufacturers opt to cut corners with the display. Budget phones end up with low-res, small screens – sometimes even (whisper it) resistive screens. Happily Huawei hasn’t stooped to such depths – there is a 4in capacitive display, which boasts a 480x800-pixel resolution (that works out to about 233 ppi). It may not be as impressive as the screen on the Sony Xperia S, but it’s decent for a low-price smartphone. It’s bright, crisp and offers subtle colours.

Speedy chip

Another place where budget phone makers economise is with the processor. Okay, it’s not a dual-or quad-core chip, but it’s a reasonable 1GHz model, which is teamed with 512Mb of RAM, so the G300 runs well with no signs of slow-down. The handset also has the benefit of a microSD card slot, which enables storage to be extended further than the onboard 2.5GB.

The snapper is also good, although not outstanding. It is a 5-megapixel model, complete with LED flash. There’s little in the way of shutter lag and the resulting images are good, although as with many phone cameras taking snaps in low light is not terribly rewarding. If you want to get creative there are a good choice of manual controls, including scene settings and white balance. There are more camera functions available from Android than there are from the iPhone, so it feels much more like a proper camera. Be aware there is no front-facing snapper if you like making video calls.

Keep in touch, pal

The G300 boasts its own keyboard app, called the Cootek TouchPal – before you start you’ll be put off by all the grammatical inaccuracies, but it does actually do the job, even though it’s not up there with the likes of TouchType’s great keyboard app, Swiftkey. There are a few other Android overlays from Huawei – for example the lock screen offers four options, depending which way you decide to swipe the padlock icon. The default setting is phone, snapper, unlock and new message but you can change this if you like.

Huawei has also got the icons to turn around in a nifty way as you switch between home pages, but that’s pretty much all that Huawei has included. The handset is exclusively with Vodafone for three months and Vodafone has its own large home screen widget, that has handy buttons to switch between Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, flight mode off and on and others. It’s useful for anyone new to smartphones.

Battery life is okay – you’ll want to be recharging every night though. Signal strength and call quality are also good.

Our conclusion

The Huawei Ascend G300 is a sleek, useful smartphone that has plenty of good features that are a surprise at this price. Yes, there are more powerful devices on the market but this is a really good choice if you’re looking to upgrade to a smartphone for the first time.